More Than 1 Billion People Expected To Be Using 5G By Year's End 55
More than 1 billion people will be connected to 5G by the end of 2022, according to the latest mobility report from Ericsson. CNET reports: Between July and September of this year, 5G added 110 million subscribers around the world, upping the total count to 870 million, said the report, released Wednesday. That's almost double the number of 5G subscribers there were by the end of 2021, which the Swedish telecommunications equipment maker estimated to be 580 million. If 5G users hit the 1 billion this year, that means fifth-generation networks will have hit the nine-figure subscriber mark two years faster than 4G did, said Ericsson, confirming that 5G is so far the "fastest-scaling mobile connectivity generation."
4G subscriptions are still growing as well, with 41 million subscribers added between July and September. It's anticipated they will peak at 5.2 billion by the end of the year, and mobile subscriptions overall are forecast to exceed 8.4 billion. By 2028, 5G is expected to reach 5 billion subscriptions globally and make up 55% of all network subscriptions, according to the report. Overall mobile subscriptions in 2028 are expected to be more than 9.2 billion.
4G subscriptions are still growing as well, with 41 million subscribers added between July and September. It's anticipated they will peak at 5.2 billion by the end of the year, and mobile subscriptions overall are forecast to exceed 8.4 billion. By 2028, 5G is expected to reach 5 billion subscriptions globally and make up 55% of all network subscriptions, according to the report. Overall mobile subscriptions in 2028 are expected to be more than 9.2 billion.
Damn, that's an awful lot of Covid (Score:4, Funny)
Think I'll need a thicker tin-foil hat
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What do you expect when news organizations pretend to be bias when implying something, then asking you to do your own research with the following rules.
1. Don't reach out to first hand sources (Scientists, Engineers, Programmers, Medical Doctors, or anyone who had dedicated their lives to understanding a topic in greater detail) about topics that they are focused on.
2. Do site experts (as for mentioned Scientist, Engineers....) on topics they have an opinion on, but had done little work or research on.
3. No
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But understanding a bit about this myself, knowing that we use these frequencies for the reason that our planet's atmosphere has a big gaping hole letting these wavelengths through, I do understand that virtually all life on the surface of Earth has evolved while being constantly bombarded with that kind of radiation from space, which made our biology come out highly resistant to that kind of influence.
So I do ha
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> I do understand that virtually all life on the surface of Earth has evolved while being constantly bombarded with that kind of radiation from space
It is actual not the same kind of radiation. Mobile phones transmitting data have a different radiation type/pattern ("jagged"/"bursty" square waves). We also know that radiation from space like UV rays still cause significant damage and death so not sure how that supports your argument.
> So I do have my doubts and want to see some harder data first, whi
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> Wow, Elon Musk's technobabble makes more sense.
If that's actually how you feel then I'm sorry. I'm trying to summarize a one hour lecture based on a decade of research by somebody much smarter than either of us.
--- Per the video description ---
The Speaker
Dr Devra Davis is an internationally recognised expert on electromagnetic radiation from mobile phones and other wireless transmitting devices. She is currently the Visiting Professor of Medicine at the Hebrew University Hadassah Medical School, and Vi
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The problem as being highlighted by your displayed literacy of the matter, like babbling about square waves and conflating UV radiation with radio radiation when I talk about the atmosphere of Earth, does not inspire confidence in you understanding what is being talked about.
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Fair enough.
Not going to argue about my literacy on this except to say what I meant by the "jagged/bursty square wave" is more accurately described as "pulsed radiation" that is "erratic and irregular". Meaning the form of the signal when sending data and communicating with a tower isn't a smooth sine wave or directly comparable with existing radiation sources. It shifts very quickly between high and low power. The research Dr. Davis is discussing suggests this distinction matters when it comes to cell dama
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To my understanding (which of course is not flawless either) she covers the most important cornerstones to understand about radiation, to our current state of understanding. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
She talks about a lack of scientific studies concerning the high frequency band that 5G uses, which has not previously been used for terrestrial communication, but has been
Re: Damn, that's an awful lot of Covid (Score:3)
Radiation research is just hard
Although you seem to have a well rounded knowledge.
I'll give it to you straight: non-ionising radiation does NOT cause tumours, cancer or cell damage at the TINY levels emanating from a phone.
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You're the second person now to assume that what I know about this matters. I was actually just passing on a recommendation from a prominent scientist who actually researches radiation and cell damage. Incidentally, she disagrees with your view that cell phones don't damage cells. Free feel to argue with her about it if that makes you feel better.
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Although you seem to have a well rounded knowledge.
I'll give it to you straight: non-ionising radiation does NOT cause tumours, cancer or cell damage at the TINY levels emanating from a phone.
I just wish people would stop making fundamentally unsupportable claims. That puny little cell phone held up to the ear is pumping orders of magnitude more radiation into your head than the gigantic 100kW broadcast TV station antenna across the street. Distance is what matters not how powerful the transmitter is.
It's one thing to cite a lack of evidence or a personal opinion. Quite another to make blanket assertions that are reasonably impossible to establish. Studies are limited by funding in participa
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Mobile phones transmitting data have a different radiation type/pattern ("jagged"/"bursty" square waves).
This is like folks who claim sea salt is different from salt.
We also know that radiation from space like UV rays still cause significant damage and death so not sure how that supports your argument.
Yes, indeed pepper is indeed different than salt. Very good professor.
Radiation damage can take 40 years to become tumours (though much less to damage sperm, fetuses, rodents and insects)
Crazy, because we've had to spend money on studying these bullshit claims for the last fifty years. Apparently UHF became cancer sometime in the late 1960s.
therefore, there's no control groups that have the same diet and environment but no constant exposure to high level RF radiation
That's not how a control works.
Heavy/constant mobile phone usage was relatively low in the general population before 2005 - Not that long ago really
Again this is poor understanding of the physics involved here. We had all kinds of radios in UHF transmitting all kinds of data before 2005.
The phone industry funds misinformation and shuts down research
Ah yes, big phone argument
Radiation research is just hard
You know what? I'm going
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> Until then, to me it's the same as microwave oven scare mongering, to which also all kinds of ills were attributed, despite there being billions of devices being operated frequently not providing data to confirm the concerns.
The ONLY reason a microwave oven (probably) isn't dangerous is because it's wrapped in a faraday cage (the metal box and mesh on the door). If it wasn't so you definitely wouldn't want to be anyway near the microwave emitter. So call it scare mongering or not but they are dangerous
Re:Damn, that's an awful lot of Covid (Score:5, Informative)
That's what's very high in a microwave oven and can burn you, which makes it dangerous compared to 2.4GHz WiFi, which operates at nearly the same frequency and has surrounded us for decades. So sure, if you managed to focus all the radiate flux from a 5G tower into the same area as the interior of your usual microwave often, then you'd have, well a microwave oven with that as well.
You should also learn about our atmosphere and that ozone layer thing that we believe formed to a substantial degree 600 million years ago. It absorbs a substantial part of the UV spectrum allowing life to evolve without having to deal with constant higher levels of radiation where a single quantum has enough energy to ionize an atom, leading to way more subtle damage to living tissue like DNA, where the cell doesn't necessarily die right away like from a burn and can lead to cancer.
The relatively sudden depletion of the ozone layer by the large scale release of CFCs into our atmosphere also lead to a relatively sudden change in those atmospheric conditions. That is very unlike the atmospheric window for what we consider (much longer wavelength or lower frequency, depending on how you want to see it) radio waves, which for all we know has been unchanged over such time scales.
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Re:Damn, that's an awful lot of Covid (Score:4, Interesting)
The parent post refers not to cancer but to a ridiculous scare: Containers of COVID vaccines had been tagged with RFID tags, which had been mistaken for 5G chips, leading people to believe that if they got the vaccine they were injected with tiny 5G tracker chips.
... and somehow that idea got reversed into 5G causing COVID.
I'm not either, entirely convinced that cellphones' radiation don't increase cancer risk. It's pretty certain that it does affect us, but not how. Before we know what happens at the molecular level, we can't tell.
... But perhaps it is not the radiation, but how the smartphone is now pervasive in daily life that is the most dangerous.
I don't trust epidemiological studies: there have been so many other cancer-causing factors that have been introduced or banned in the past decades, and with towers being erected all around us, there is no longer any control group.
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It's pretty certain that it does affect us, but not how
The main problem that cell phones cause that pose the most harmful to humans is distracted drivers.
We've literally had nearly 50 years of studying UHF and SHF frequencies, on the basis of cancer or other harmful effects. And we've been dealing with these frequencies for way longer than that. There's been no conclusive evidence that indicates that these frequencies do anything to the human body.
there have been so many other cancer-causing factors that have been introduced or banned in the past decades
I mean if you want a huge contributor to cancer rates that goes on without hindrance that we know for a fact cont
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... But perhaps it is not the radiation, but how the smartphone is now pervasive in daily life that is the most dangerous.
Well... wasn't the original concern with cellphones that people would get brain cancer from holding them next against their heads while talking? Many (maybe most?) smartphone users rarely actually use their phones as telephones, and when they do, lots of them are using handsfree setups that keep the devices away from their heads. Texting, email, social media -- all use cases where the phone is not particularly close to the user's head.
Frankly, people who worry about cellphone radiation should consider the
More Than 1 Billion suckers! (Score:1)
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So... like any active RF device?
Not even close, 5G multilateration allows carriers to determine when you are taking a dump.
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Using a protocol (5G) that was developed by Huawei, which has connections to the Chinese government.
Re:More Than 1 Billion suckers! (Score:4, Funny)
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no incentive (Score:2)
For me, I see little incentive to move from 4G to 5G, there may be a speed increase, but not as dramatic as GPRS to 3G. Back when I moved from 3G to 4G it was natural, a breeze: my phone was already supporting the new standard and the carrier offered a better plan, "unlimited" on 4G versus 2 or 3 GB on 3G at the same price (not sure what is the limit on "unlimited", definitely more than 7 GB that I used the most so far).
No incentive needed (Score:1)
Plenty of people will just get a new phone (possibly "free" with their plan), which will support "5G", and off they go. That's how you get such adoption numbers, because end users are not flocking to the tech itself. They don't care. They just care about their cat videos.
There may be some complaints of mysteriously running out of data allowances much sooner in the month, though. But as long as those are nicely spread out, most people will just cough up some dosh for an extension or a larger allowance. Payi
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What 5G has done, though, has been to increase the size of newer smartphone models because it requires more power and therefore larger batteries.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Signals! (Score:2)
5G is nice if I'm in that area with strong singals! For me, connections got worse for cellular in my rural area. Old iPhone 4S and 6 + had more stabilities. 11 Pro Max was a little worse, but still OK. 12 mini and 13 are awful. :(
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I wish my phone had a setting to fall back to 4G if 5G reception drops to 2 bars or lower. The same for WiFi by the way, the phone will cling like mad to a tenuous WiFi connection instead of just giving up and switching to cellular data.
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But the day will come when there's no newer phones that come without 5G and then it's no longer a price factor to consider.
Until then, I don't really see the need for a mobile device. Like my phones have FullHD displays (a bit higher) and st
Another way of looking at it (Score:3)
1 billion perfectly good phones have been junked recently either to the cupboard or worse landfill. For what? TO be able to download a film in seconds (which almost no one ever does)? For fixed wireless data links 5G is perfect, but for mobile phones they're a virtual irrelevance.
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Also, while the ads focus on the transfer speeds like they're individually important, the main point of faster mobile networks is the increa
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I have to wonder how much longer my 4G mobile wi-fi hot spot will remain usable before the carriers decide that I need to "upgrade" to 5G.
And of course, the treadmill will never end, along with the stream of e-waste that results from it.
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1 billion perfectly good phones have been junked
What makes you say that? A good many people will be making the switch to 5G as part of nothing more than the natural course of replacing their old phones. Nothing more. I'd have a 5G phone now if my previous phone broke only 2 months later. As it stands turns out my girlfriend does.
No one is junking perfectly good 4G phones just to upgrade to 5G. They may junk them for other reasons, but 5G has nothing to do with it.
The remaining 7 billion people.... (Score:2)
AT&T phones will say so! (Score:2)
I bought a 4G phone a couple of years ago. It now sometimes says it's 5G. The miracle of AT&T!
Inflated subscription stats? (Score:2)
I have a 5G phone with a 5G subscription, 'cause that didn't cost any more. However, it's never once actually achieved 5G. There aren't enough cell towers in my area. If the cell company deprecates "lower levels" of service, my cell phone goes dead, and they lose their contract.
This 5G advertising feels like one of those Bing scams, where Microsoft pays lots of people to use their search engine to inflate their ratings. (You can probably still get in on this, although it runs maybe $5/month for using their
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I have only seen the "5G" indicator on my phone ONCE - while sitting in a jet that was taxiing on a runway at a major airport.
Oh the IRONY of it all
conspiracy theories on top of conspiracy theories (Score:1)
I turned off my 5G for sucking my battery dry (Score:2)
E-Waste (Score:2)
5G will fry your brains (Score:1)
Don't take my word for it, watch Conspiracy Music Guru. He is always right.
Seriously, the guy is amazingly talented, and well worth watching.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKYN3-GB7y0